Firefox 4 has finally been released after an amazing number of Beta versions and 2 Release Candidates. It's about time! And while everyone has its idea on the number of Beta versions needed and how often a major version must be released - some find it reassuring that Firefox has had so many ones when others find it annoying and wish for a shorter release cycle - Mozilla said that Firefox 5 should be available in June 2011 after only 16 weeks of development. And we have been reminded why Mozilla has shortened its release cycle: they want more cakes from the Microsoft Internet Explorer team!

We are glad to announce the release of Web And Say's sister web-site named Web 2.0 Generators. Web 2.0 generators' aim is to provide free tools, helpers and ressources for all your web development needs. Currently, you can use the HTML Encoder and Decoder tool which converts the non-html, non-escaped input and converts it to HTML, highly useful in various cases, and generate a .htpasswd login and password key pair for your Apache hosted web sites. So head on to Web 2.0 Generators for free tools to speed up web development.

A few web based operating systems have emerged the last few years including Jolicloud and EyeOS with many more to come such as Google's own Chrome OS but none of them have the "cool" factor of Michael Vincent's Windows 3.11 browser edition. How cool is it to use the old calculator, play YouTube video on the 3.1 media player and even browse the web through the integrated Internet Browser or use the MS-DOS Prompt. I think a tear just fell down my face while seeing this oldie again, and for that, congrats Michael.

Microsoft is honest in the recent blog post about using one platform to build another by saying that "some people have gone as far as to suggest HTML 5 could eliminate the need for Flash and Silverlight". Yes, we do want to go that far and we don't want Flash or Silverlight addons / plugins (call them however you like) in our fully capable, HTML 5 compliant web browser! I mean, why should we want them if Canvas is perfectly capable of achieving the same task ? Well, one of the answer is due to Microsoft's own Internet Explorer: as of version 8, it still doesn't support the Canvas element. And Microsoft's solution is pretty funny: we don't support the Canvas element but look, our own Silverlight can do it. There is no way you won't install Silverlight now, right ? Wrong !

Up until now, the Google home page was meant to be as lite as possible. It only contained one image with the Google logo, some links to other Google tools, services and legal information. But that has changed recently as a new prominent image appeared to publicize the Google Chrome web browser. And this is quite huge as the overall advertisement's size is almost the same as the biggest element on the Google's home page: Google's logo itself!

Chrome Experiments is "Not your mother's JavaScript" as it was "created to showcase cool experiments for both JavaScript and web browsers". And Dean McNamee proves it by providing Monster, "a demonstration of what can be done with browser web standards (without Flash). A square turns to a cube, a sphere, and a monster. Realtime procedural 3d in JavaScript". Not happy to prove that Javascript can be a (fresh) contestant in the 3D world, Dean also provides a simpler, yet beautiful demo named Colorscube. A must see for all Javascript graphics coders out there! Thanks to Niko of Irrlicht3d for the heads up.

If you were using Google this past Saturday between 6:27 a.m. and 7:25 a.m. PST, chances are that you have been warned by the search engine that your search result "may harm your computer". Trying another request couldn't help and you soon realized that the whole Internet might have harmed your computer. If that's no news for some of us, this might be a different story for Internet novices who think that Google is the Internet.

Through Ajaxian, the following 12 characters code seems to be the shortest way to detect any version of Internet Explorer, including IE 8. This is the result that came from a comment in a post from the Web Reflection blog. Very interesting!

What can you do in 25 lines of ActionScript ? How about participating to the The 25-Line ActionScript Contest! January finalists include amazing entries, such as a real-time webcam video to ASCII art conversion, fire blending, 3D world exploring and Mandelbrot zooming amongst other. This really shows the power of Flash and Action Script as well as the gain of interest in the web-related demo scene. Now the question is when will we be able to see such advanced demos using only Javascript and Canvas ? My guess is pretty soon if the war for browser performance continues...